A Missionary Momma Doing Life in Central America

The Parable of the Ant Girl

Once upon a time there was a girl who had a strange obsession with ants. It’s a good thing she lived in Costa Rica where ants out number humans a billion to one. There just so happened to be a huge ant hill right outside of her front door. This was a stroke of fortune for the Ant Loving Girl!

Every day she would spend hours upon hours sitting by the ant hill watching her beloveds go in and out, busy at their work, oblivious to her presence. She would often take a sandwich out with her as she watched the busy ants, and she would carefully sprinkle the crumbs around the hill right where the ants were bound to find them. When it rained she stood over the ant hill with an umbrella, protecting the ant world from certain destruction. And every time she went in and out of her own house, she was careful to step OVER the ant hill and not step on a single ant.

One day she let a little ant crawl up her toe, up her foot and further up her leg. It tickled, so she put her finger down into the path of the ant and it crawled up onto her hand. She carefully examined the ant as it crawled all over her hands and arms, completely oblivious to the power of life and death that the girl held in the very hands over which it crawled. “This ant can never understand what a great love I have for him. He can never comprehend how much of a superior being I am. He can never even begin to grasp the magnitude of my thoughts towards him. He’s just an ant. He doesn’t know the person who provides him with food, protection and shelter. He has no idea how many times I have spared his life by not stepping on him. He’s just a puny ant compared to me.”

In that moment, the girl realized that the only way she could possibly communicate her love to this colony of ants would be to magically become an ant herself. Then she could go to the ant world and communicate in ant language. She would try to explain to them what a Girl is. She would try to detail how they had been cared for by the Girl. Even then, it would be hard for the ants to understand because ant brains are so small and their language is so limited. But she could try. Some would believe in the Girl, others would be skeptical, and others would out right deny the existence of Girls. But she had to try to tell the ants the wonderful news about her great love for them.

So because this is a story, one day the girl magically turned into an ant and embarked on her mission to communicate with her beloved ants. For a while, her story was a novel curiosity for the ants and it provided a nice break from their daily work. But there were many ants who just could not comprehend what this new ant was trying to say. They just couldn’t bend their little brains around the idea of such a superior being, let alone accept the idea that they have been unwitting benefactors of the great kindness of something called a Girl. But then there were some who felt like the message of love brought real meaning to the grind of their everyday lives. They felt like they had individual value beyond just pushing dirt around like a bunch of slaves.

But the story took a shocking turn the day that the soldier ants, sent to protect the colony, discovered this intruder ant-girl distracting ants from their work. The soldier ants killed the ant-girl.

The next day it rained. Giant drops of rain fell from the sky like they never had before and completely destroyed the ant hill. “What have we done!?!” cried the ants is despair. “We’ve killed the Girl. Now we are doomed. We are left exposed to the elements and we are running out of food. We should have believed her.”

In some stories the magic wears off after midnight. So sometime in the wee hours of the dawn, the girl awoke in her own human bed once more. She thought about all that had happened down in the ant colony. She decided that even though the ants had rejected her, for the sake of the few who had believed in her, she would continue to watch over the ant colony… because she loved them.

“For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son that whoever believed in Him would not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16

Share this:

Like this:

Related

About amamiot

My family and I are missionaries in Costa Rica. Before that we lived in Mexico and before that we came from Minnesota.
I am a teacher, an artist, a "journaler", a quilter, a cooker, a baker, a hostess, a mom, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend. I like reading and watching movies (ehem, and quoting movie lines). I would love to be in a Jane Austin movie but I don't know how to ballroom dance or play Whist.